The Talisman

19

Jack in the Box

1

They camped that night in the ruins of a burned-out house with a wide field on one side and a copse of woods on another. There was a farmhouse on the far side of the field, but Jack thought that he and Wolf would be safe enough if they were quiet and stayed in most of the time. After the sun went down, Wolf went off into the woods. He was moving slowly, his face close to the ground. Before Jack lost sight of him, he thought that Wolf looked like a nearsighted man hunting for his dropped spectacles. Jack became quite nervous (visions of Wolf caught in a steel-jawed trap had begun to come to him, Wolf caught and grimly not howling as he gnawed at his own leg . . .) before Wolf returned, walking almost upright this time, and carrying plants in both hands, the roots dangling out of his fists.

“What have you got there, Wolf?” Jack asked.

“Medicine,” Wolf said morosely. “But it’s not very good, Jack. Wolf! Nothing’s much good in your world!”

“Medicine? What do you mean?”

But Wolf would say no more. He produced two wooden matches from the bib pocket of his overalls and started a smokeless fire and asked Jack if he could find a can. Jack found a beer can in the ditch. Wolf smelled it and wrinkled his nose.

“More bad smells. Need water, Jack. Clean water. I’ll go, if you’re too tired.”

“Wolf, I want to know what you’re up to.”

“I’ll go,” Wolf said. “There’s a farm right across that field. Wolf! There’ll be water there. You rest.”

Jack had a vision of some farmer’s wife looking out the kitchen window as she did the supper dishes and seeing Wolf skulking around in the dooryard with a beer can in one hairy paw and a bunch of roots and herbs in the other.

“I’ll go,” he said.

The farm was not five hundred feet away from where they had camped; the warm yellow lights were clearly visible across the field. Jack went, filled the beer can at a shed faucet without incident, and started back. Halfway across the field he realized he could see his shadow, and looked up at the sky.

The moon, now almost full, rode the eastern horizon.

Troubled, Jack went back to Wolf and gave him the can of water. Wolf sniffed, winced again, but said nothing. He put the can over the fire and began to sift crumbled bits of the things he had picked in through the pop-top hole. Five minutes or so later, a terrible smell—a reek, not to put too fine a point on it—began to rise on the steam. Jack winced. He had no doubt at all that Wolf would want him to drink that stuff, and Jack also had no doubt it would kill him. Slowly and horribly, probably.

He closed his eyes and began snoring loudly and theatrically. If Wolf thought he was sleeping, he wouldn’t wake him up. No one woke up sick people, did they? And Jack was sick; his fever had come back at dark, raging through him, punishing him with chills even while he oozed sweat from every pore.

Looking through his lashes, he saw Wolf set the can aside to cool. Wolf sat back and looked skyward, his hairy hands locked around his knees, his face dreamy and somehow beautiful.

He’s looking at the moon, Jack thought, and felt a thread of fear.

We don’t go near the herd when we change. Good Jason, no! We’d eat them!

Wolf, tell me something: am I the herd now?

Jack shivered.

Five minutes later—Jack almost had gone to sleep by then—Wolf leaned over the can, sniffed, nodded, picked it up, and came over to where Jack was leaning against a fallen, fire-blackened beam with an extra shirt behind his neck to pad the angle. Jack closed his eyes tightly and resumed snoring.

“Come on, Jack,” Wolf said jovially. “I know you’re awake. You can’t fool Wolf.”

Jack opened his eyes and looked at Wolf with bleary resentment. “How did you know?”

“People have a sleep-smell and a wake-smell,” Wolf said. “Even Strangers must know that, don’t they?”

“I guess we don’t,” Jack said.

“Anyway, you have to drink this. It’s medicine. Drink it up, Jack, right here and now.”

“I don’t want it,” Jack said. The smell coming from the can was swampy and rancid.

“Jack,” Wolf said, “you’ve got a sick-smell, too.”

Jack looked at him, saying nothing.

“Yes,” Wolf said. “And it keeps getting worse. It’s not really bad, not yet, but—Wolf!—it’s going to get bad if you don’t take some medicine.”

“Wolf, I’ll bet you’re great at sniffing out herbs and things back in the Territories, but this is the Country of Bad Smells, remember? You’ve probably got ragweed in there, and poison oak, and bitter vetch, and—”

“They’re good things,” Wolf said. “Just not very strong, God pound them.” Wolf looked wistful. “Not everything smells bad here, Jack. There are good smells, too. But the good smells are like the medicine plants. Weak. I think they were stronger, once.”

Wolf was looking dreamily up at the moon again, and Jack felt a recurrence of his earlier unease.

“I’ll bet this was a good place once,” Wolf said. “Clean and full of power . . .”

“Wolf?” Jack asked in a low voice. “Wolf, the hair’s come back on your palms.”

Wolf started and looked at Jack. For a moment—it might have been his feverish imagination, and even if not, it was only for a moment—Wolf looked at Jack with a flat, greedy hunger. Then he seemed to shake himself, as if out of a bad dream.

“Yes,” he said. “But I don’t want to talk about that, and I don’t want you to talk about that. It doesn’t matter, not yet. Wolf! Just drink your medicine, Jack, that’s all you have to do.”

Wolf was obviously not going to take no for an answer; if Jack didn’t drink the medicine, then Wolf might feel duty-bound to simply pull open his jaws and pour it down his throat.

“Remember, if this kills me, you’ll be alone,” Jack said grimly, taking the can. It was still warm.

A look of terrible distress spread over Wolf’s face. He pushed the round glasses up on his nose. “Don’t want to hurt you, Jack—Wolf never wants to hurt Jack.” The expression was so large and so full of misery that it would have been ludicrous had it not been so obviously genuine.

Jack gave in and drank the contents of the can. There was no way he could stand against that expression of hurt dismay. The taste was as awful as he had imagined it would be . . . and for a moment didn’t the world waver? Didn’t it waver as if he were about to flip back into the Territories?

“Wolf!” he yelled. “Wolf, grab my hand!”

Wolf did, looking both concerned and excited. “Jack? Jacky? What is it?”

The taste of the medicine began to leave his mouth. At the same time, a warm glow—the sort of glow he got from a small sip of brandy on the few occasions his mother had allowed him to have one—began to spread in his stomach. And the world grew solid around him again. That brief wavering might also have been imagination . . . but Jack didn’t think so.

We almost went. For a moment there it was very close. Maybe I can do it without the magic juice . . . maybe I can!

“Jack? What is it?”

“I feel better,” he said, and managed a smile. “I feel better, that’s all.” He discovered that he did, too.

“You smell better, too,” Wolf said cheerfully. “Wolf! Wolf!”

2

He continued to improve the next day, but he was weak. Wolf carried him “horseyback” and they made slow progress west. Around dusk they started looking for a place to lie up for the night. Jack spotted a woodshed in a dirty little gully. It was surrounded by trash and bald tires. Wolf agreed without saying much. He had been quiet and morose all day long.

Jack fell asleep almost at once and woke up around eleven needing to urinate. He looked beside him and saw that Wolf’s place was empty. Jack thought he had probably gone in search of more herbs in order to administer the equivalent of a booster shot. Jack wrinkled his nose, but if Wolf wanted him to drink more of the stuff, he would. It surely had made him feel one hell of a lot better.

He went around to the side of the shed, a straight slim boy wearing Jockey shorts, unlaced sneakers, and an open shirt. He peed for what seemed like a very long time indeed, looking up at the sky as he did so. It was one of those misleading nights which sometimes comes to the midwest in October and early November, not so long before winter comes down with a cruel, iron snap. It was almost tropically warm, and the mild breeze was like a caress.

Overhead floated the moon, white and round and lovely. It cast a clear and yet eerily misleading glow over everything, seeming to simultaneously enhance and obscure. Jack stared at it, aware that he was almost hypnotized, not really caring.

We don’t go near the herd when we change. Good Jason, no!

Am I the herd now, Wolf?

There was a face on the moon. Jack saw with no surprise that it was Wolf’s face . . . except it was not wide and open and a little surprised, a face of goodness and simplicity. This face was narrow, ah yes, and dark; it was dark with hair, but the hair didn’t matter. It was dark with intent.

We don’t go near them, we’d eat them, eat them, we’d eat them, Jack, when we change we’d—

The face in the moon, a chiaroscuro carved in bone, was the face of a snarling beast, its head cocked in that final moment before the lunge, the mouth open and filled with teeth.

We’d eat we’d kill we’d kill, kill, KILL KILL

A finger touched Jack’s shoulder and ran slowly down to his waist.

Jack had only been standing there with his penis in his hand, the foreskin pinched lightly between thumb and forefinger, looking at the moon. Now a fresh, hard jet of urine spurted out of him.

“I scared you,” Wolf said from behind him. “I’m sorry, Jack. God pound me.”

But for a moment Jack didn’t think Wolf was sorry.

For a moment it sounded as if Wolf were grinning.

And Jack was suddenly sure he was going to be eaten up.

House of bricks? he thought incoherently. I don’t even have a house of straw that I can run to.

Now the fear came, dry terror in his veins hotter than any fever.

Who’s afraid of the big bad Wolf the big bad Wolf the big bad—

“Jack?”

I am, I am, oh God I am afraid of the big bad Wolf—

He turned around slowly.

Wolf’s face, which had been lightly scruffed with stubble when the two of them crossed to the shed and lay down, was now heavily bearded from a point so high on his cheekbones that the hair almost seemed to begin at his temples. His eyes glared a bright red-orange.

“Wolf, are you all right?” Jack asked in a husky, breathy whisper. It was as loud as he could talk.

“Yes,” Wolf said. “I’ve been running with the moon. It’s beautiful. I ran . . . and ran . . . and ran. But I’m all right, Jack.” Wolf smiled to show how all right he was, and revealed a mouthful of giant, rending teeth. Jack recoiled in numb horror. It was like looking into the mouth of that Alien thing in the movies.

Wolf saw his expression, and dismay crossed his roughened, thickening features. But under the dismay—and not far under, either—was something else. Something that capered and grinned and showed its teeth. Something that would chase prey until blood flew from the prey’s nose in its terror, until it moaned and begged. Something that would laugh as it tore the screaming prey open.

It would laugh even if he were the prey.

Especially if he were the prey.

“Jack, I’m sorry,” he said. “The time . . . it’s coming. We’ll have to do something. We’ll . . . tomorrow. We’ll have to . . . have to . . .” He looked up and that hypnotized expression spread over his face as he looked into the sky.

He raised his head and howled.

And Jack thought he heard—very faintly—the Wolf in the moon howl back.

Horror stole through him, quietly and completely. Jack slept no more that night.

3

The next day Wolf was better. A little better, anyway, but he was almost sick with tension. As he was trying to tell Jack what to do—as well as he could, anyway—a jet plane passed high overhead. Wolf jumped to his feet, rushed out, and howled at it, shaking his fists at the sky. His hairy feet were bare again. They had swelled and split the cheap penny loafers wide open.

He tried to tell Jack what to do, but he had little to go on except old tales and rumors. He knew what the change was in his own world, but he sensed it might be much worse—more powerful and more dangerous—in the land of the Strangers. And he felt that now. He felt that power sweeping through him, and tonight when the moon rose he felt sure it would sweep him away.

Over and over again he reiterated that he didn’t want to hurt Jack, that he would rather kill himself than hurt Jack.

4

Daleville was the closest small town. Jack got there shortly after the courthouse clock struck noon, and went into the True Value hardware store. One hand was stuffed into his pants pocket, touching his depleted roll of bills.

“Help you, son?”

“Yes sir,” Jack said. “I want to buy a padlock.”

“Well, step over here and let’s us have a look. We’ve got Yales, and Mosslers, and Lok-Tites, and you name it. What kind of padlock you want?”

“A big one,” Jack said, looking at the clerk with his shadowed, somehow disquieting eyes. His face was gaunt but still persuasive in its odd beauty.

“A big one,” the clerk mused. “And what would you be wanting it for, might I ask?”

“My dog,” Jack said steadily. A Story. Always they wanted a Story. He had gotten this one ready on the way in from the shed where they had spent the last two nights. “I need it for my dog. I have to lock him up. He bites.”

5

The padlock he picked out cost ten dollars, leaving Jack with about ten dollars to his name. It hurt him to spend that much, and he almost went for a cheaper item . . . and then he had a memory of how Wolf had looked the night before, howling at the moon with orange fire spilling from his eyes.

He paid the ten dollars.

He stuck out his thumb at every passing car as he hurried back to the shed, but of course none of them stopped. Perhaps he looked too wild-eyed, too frantic. He certainly felt wild-eyed and frantic. The newspaper the hardware store clerk had let him look at promised sunset at six o’clock P.M. on the dot. Moonrise was not listed, but Jack guessed seven, at the latest. It was already one p.m., and he had no idea where he was going to put Wolf for the night.

You have to lock me up, Jack, Wolf had said. Have to lock me up good. Because if I get out, I’ll hurt anything I can run down and catch hold of. Even you, Jack. Even you. So you have to lock me up and keep me locked up, no matter what I do or what I say. Three days, Jack, until the moon starts to get thin again. Three days . . . even four, if you’re not completely sure.

Yes, but where? It had to be someplace away from people, so no one would hear Wolf if—when, he amended reluctantly—he began to howl. And it had to be someplace a lot stronger than the shed they had been staying in. If Jack used his fine new ten-dollar padlock on the door of that place, Wolf would bust right out through the back.

Where?

He didn’t know, but he knew he had only six hours to find a place . . . maybe less.

Jack began to hurry along even faster.

6

They had passed several empty houses to come this far, had even spent the night in one, and Jack watched all the way back from Daleville for the signs of lack of occupancy: for blank uncovered windows and FOR SALE signs, for grass grown as high as the second porch step and the sense of lifelessness common to empty houses. It was not that he hoped he could lock Wolf into some farmer’s bedroom for the three days of his Change. Wolf would be able to knock down the door of the shed. But one farmhouse had a root cellar; that would have worked.

A stout oaken door set into a grassy mound like a door in a fairy tale, and behind it a room without walls or ceiling—an underground room, a cave no creature could dig its way out of in less than a month. The cellar would have held Wolf, and the earthen floor and walls would have kept him from injuring himself.

But the empty farmhouse, and the root cellar, must have been at least thirty or forty miles behind them. They would never make it back there in the time remaining before moonrise. And would Wolf still be willing to run forty miles, especially for the purpose of putting himself in a foodless solitary confinement, so close to the time of his Change?

Suppose, in fact, that too much time had passed. Suppose that Wolf had come too close to the edge and would refuse any sort of imprisonment? What if that capering, greedy underside of his character had climbed up out of the pit and was beginning to look around this odd new world, wondering where the food was hiding? The big padlock threatening to rip the seams out of Jack’s pocket would be useless.

He could turn around, Jack realized. He could walk back to Daleville and keep on going. In a day or two he’d be nearly to Lapel or Cicero, and maybe he would work an afternoon at a feed store or get in some hours as a farmhand, make a few dollars or scrounge a meal or two, and then push all the way to the Illinois border in the next few days. Illinois would be easy, Jack thought—he didn’t know how he was going to do this, exactly, but he was pretty sure he could get to Springfield and the Thayer School only a day or two after he made it into Illinois.

And, Jack puzzled as he hesitated a quarter-mile down the road from the shed, how would he explain Wolf to Richard Sloat? His old buddy Richard, in his round glasses and ties and laced cordovans? Richard Sloat was thoroughly rational and, though very intelligent, hard-headed. If you couldn’t see it, it probably didn’t exist. Richard had never been interested in fairy tales as a child; he had remained unexcited by Disney films about fairy godmothers who turned pumpkins into coaches, about wicked queens who owned speaking mirrors. Such conceits were too absurd to snare Richard’s six-year-old (or eight-year-old, or ten-year-old) fancy—unlike, say, a photograph of an electron microscope. Richard’s enthusiasm had embraced Rubik’s Cube, which he could solve in less than ninety seconds, but Jack did not think it would go so far as to accept a six-foot-five, sixteen-year-old werewolf.

For a moment Jack twisted helplessly on the road—for a moment he almost thought that he would be able to leave Wolf behind and get on with his journey toward Richard and then the Talisman.

What if I’m the herd? he asked himself silently. And what he thought of was Wolf scrambling down the bank after his poor terrified animals, throwing himself into the water to rescue them.

7

The shed was empty. As soon as Jack saw the door leaning open he knew that Wolf had taken himself off somewhere, but he scrambled down the side of the gully and picked his way through the trash almost in disbelief. Wolf could not have gone farther than a dozen feet by himself, yet he had done so. “I’m back,” Jack called. “Hey, Wolf? I got the lock.” He knew he was talking to himself, and a glance into the shed confirmed this. His pack lay on a little wooden bench; a stack of pulpy magazines dated 1973 stood beside it. In one corner of the windowless wooden shed odd lengths of deadwood had been carelessly heaped, as if someone had once half-heartedly made a stab at squirreling away firewood. Otherwise the shed was bare. Jack turned around from the gaping door and looked helplessly up the banks of the gully.

Old tires scattered here and there among the weeds, a bundle of faded and rotting political pamphlets still bearing the name LUGAR, one dented blue-and-white Connecticut license plate, beer-bottles with labels so faded they were white . . . no Wolf. Jack raised his hands to cup his mouth. “Hey, Wolf! I’m back!” He expected no reply, and got none. Wolf was gone.

“Shit,” Jack said, and put his hands on his hips. Conflicting emotions, exasperation and relief and anxiety, surged through him. Wolf had left in order to save Jack’s life—that had to be the meaning of his disappearance. As soon as Jack had set off for Daleville, his partner had skipped out. He had run away on those tireless legs and by now was miles away, waiting for the moon to come up. By now, Wolf could be anywhere.

This realization was part of Jack’s anxiety. Wolf could have taken himself into the woods visible at the end of the long field bordered by the gully, and in the woods gorged himself on rabbits and fieldmice and whatever else might live there, moles and badgers and the whole cast of The Wind in the Willows. Which would have been dandy. But Wolf just might sniff out the livestock, wherever it was, and put himself in real danger. He might also, Jack realized, sniff out the farmer and his family. Or, even worse, Wolf might have worked his way close to one of the towns north of them. Jack couldn’t be sure, but he thought that a transformed Wolf would probably be capable of slaughtering at least half a dozen people before somebody finally killed him.

“Damn, damn, damn,” Jack said, and began to climb up the far side of the gully. He had no real hopes of seeing Wolf—he would probably never see Wolf again, he realized. In some small-town paper, a few days down the road, he’d find a horrified description of the carnage caused by an enormous wolf which had apparently wandered into Main Street looking for food. And there would be more names. More names like Thielke, Heidel, Hagen . . .

At first he looked toward the road, hoping even now to see Wolf’s giant form skulking away to the east—he wouldn’t want to meet Jack returning from Daleville. The long road was as deserted as the shed.

Of course.

The sun, as good a clock as the one he wore on his wrist, had slipped well below its meridian.

Jack turned despairingly toward the long field and the edge of the woods behind it. Nothing moved but the tips of the stubble, which bent before a chill wandering breeze.

HUNT CONTINUES FOR KILLER WOLF, a headline would read, a few days down the road.

Then a large brown boulder at the edge of the woods did move, and Jack realized that the boulder was Wolf. He had hunkered down on his heels and was staring at Jack.

“Oh, you inconvenient son of a bitch,” Jack said, and in the midst of his relief knew that a part of him had been secretly delighted by Wolf’s departure. He stepped toward him.

Wolf did not move, but his posture somehow intensified, became more electric and aware. Jack’s next step required more courage than the first.

Twenty yards farther, he saw that Wolf had continued to change. His hair had become even thicker, more luxuriant, as if it had been washed and blow-dried; and now Wolf’s beard really did seem to begin just beneath his eyes. He entire body, hunkered down as it was, seemed to have become wider and more powerful. His eyes, filled with liquid fire, blazed Halloween orange.

Jack made himself go nearer. He nearly stopped when he thought he saw that Wolf now had paws instead of hands, but a moment later realized that his hands and fingers were completely covered by a thatch of coarse dark hair. Wolf continued to gaze at him with his blazing eyes. Jack again halved the distance between them, then paused. For the first time since he had come upon Wolf tending his flock beside a Territories stream, he could not read his expression. Maybe Wolf had become too alien for that already, or maybe all the hair simply concealed too much of his face. What he was sure of was that some strong emotion had gripped Wolf.

A dozen feet away he stopped for good and forced himself to look into the werewolf’s eyes.

“Soon now, Jacky,” Wolf said, and his mouth dropped open in a fearsome parody of a smile.

“I thought you ran away,” Jack said.

“Sat here to see you coming. Wolf!”

Jack did not know what to make of this declaration. Obscurely, it reminded him of Little Red Riding Hood. Wolf’s teeth did look particularly crowded, sharp, and strong. “I got the lock,” he said. He pulled it out of his pocket and held it up. “You have any ideas while I was gone, Wolf?”

Wolf’s whole face—eyes, teeth, everything—blazed out at Jack.

“You’re the herd now, Jacky,” Wolf said. And lifted his head and released a long unfurling howl.

8

A less frightened Jack Sawyer might have said, “Can that stuff, willya?” or “We’ll have every dog in the county around here if you keep that up,” but both of these statements died in his throat. He was too scared to utter a word. Wolf gave him his A #1 smile again, his mouth looking like a television commercial for Ginsu knives, and rose effortlessly to his feet. The John Lennon glasses seemed to be receding back into the bristly top of his beard and the thick hair falling over his temples. He looked at least seven feet tall to Jack, and as burly as the beer barrels in the back room of the Oatley Tap.

“You have good smells in this world, Jacky,” Wolf said.

And Jack finally recognized his mood. Wolf was exultant. He was like a man who against steep odds had just won a particularly difficult contest. At the bottom of this triumphant emotion percolated that joyful and feral quality Jack had seen once before.

“Good smells! Wolf! Wolf!”

Jack took a delicate step backward, wondering if he was upwind of Wolf. “You never said anything good about it before,” he said, not quite coherently.

“Before is before and now is now,” Wolf said. “Good things. Many good things—all around. Wolf will find them, you bet.”

That made it worse, for now Jack could see—could nearly feel—a flat, confident greed, a wholly amoral hunger shining in the reddish eyes. I’ll eat anything I catch and kill, it said. Catch and kill.

“I hope none of those good things are people, Wolf,” Jack said quietly.

Wolf lifted his chin and uttered a bubbling series of noises half-howl, half-laughter.

“Wolfs need to eat,” he said, and his voice, too, was joyous. “Oh, Jacky, how Wolfs do need to eat. EAT! Wolf!”

“I’m going to have to put you in that shed,” Jack said. “Remember, Wolf? I got the lock? We’ll just have to hope it’ll hold you. Let’s start over there now, Wolf. You’re scaring the shit out of me.”

This time the bubbling laughter ballooned out of Wolf’s chest. “Scared! Wolf knows! Wolf knows, Jacky! You have the fear-smell.”

“I’m not surprised,” Jack said. “Let’s get over to that shed now, okay?”

“Oh, I’m not going in the shed,” Wolf said, and a long pointed tongue curled out from between his jaws. “No, not me, Jacky. Not Wolf. Wolf can’t go in the shed.” The jaws widened, and the crowded teeth shone. “Wolf remembered, Jacky. Wolf! Right here and now! Wolf remembered!”

Jack stepped backward.

“More fear-smell. Even on your shoes. Shoes, Jacky! Wolf!”

Shoes that smelled of fear were evidently deeply comic.

“You have to go in the shed, that’s what you should remember.”

“Wrong! Wolf! You go in the shed, Jacky! Jacky goes in shed! I remembered! Wolf!”

The werewolf’s eyes slid from blazing reddish-orange to a mellow, satisfied shade of purple. “From The Book of Good Farming, Jacky. The story of the Wolf Who Would Not Injure His Herd. Remember it, Jacky? The herd goes in the barn. Remember? The lock goes on the door. When the Wolf knows his Change is coming on him, the herd goes in the barn and the lock goes on the door. He Would Not Injure His Herd.” The jaws split and widened again, and the long dark tongue curled up at the tip in a perfect image of delight. “Not! Not! Not Injure His Herd! Wolf! Right here and now!”

“You want me to stay locked up in the shed for three days?” Jack said.

“I have to eat, Jacky,” Wolf said simply, and the boy saw something dark, quick, and sinister slide toward him from Wolf’s changing eyes. “When the moon takes me with her, I have to eat. Good smells here, Jacky. Plenty of food for Wolf. When the moon lets me go, Jacky comes out of the shed.”

“What happens if I don’t want to be locked up for three days?”

“Then Wolf will kill Jacky. And then Wolf will be damned.”

“This is all in The Book of Good Farming, is it?”

Wolf nodded his head. “I remembered. I remembered in time, Jacky. When I was waiting for you.”

Jack was still trying to adjust himself to Wolf’s idea. He would have to go three days without food. Wolf would be free to wander. He would be in prison, and Wolf would have the world. Yet it was probably the only way he would survive Wolf’s transformation. Given the choice of a three-day fast or death, he’d choose an empty stomach. And then it suddenly seemed to Jack that this reversal was really no reversal at all—he would still be free, locked in the shed, and Wolf out in the world would still be imprisoned. His cage would just be larger than Jack’s. “Then God bless The Book of Good Farming, because I would never have thought of it myself.”

Wolf gleamed at him again, and then looked up at the sky with a blank, yearning expression. “Not long now, Jacky. You’re the herd. I have to put you inside.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “I guess you do have to.”

And this too struck Wolf as uproariously funny. As he laughed his howling laugh, he threw an arm around Jack’s waist and picked him up and carried him all the way across the field. “Wolf will take care of you, Jacky,” he said when he had nearly howled himself inside-out. He set the boy gently on the ground at the top of the gully.

“Wolf,” Jack said.

Wolf widened his jaws and began rubbing his crotch.

“You can’t kill any people, Wolf,” Jack said. “Remember that—if you remembered that story, then you can remember not to kill any people. Because if you do, they’ll hunt you down for sure. If you kill any people, if you kill even one person, then a lot of people will come to kill you. And they’d get you, Wolf. I promise you. They’d nail your hide to a board.”

“No people, Jacky. Animals smell better than people. No people. Wolf!”

They walked down the slope into the gully. Jack removed the lock from his pocket and several times clipped it through the metal ring that would hold it, showing Wolf how to use the key. “Then you slide the key under the door, okay?” he asked. “When you’ve changed back, I’ll push it back to you.” Jack glanced down at the bottom of the door—there was a two-inch gap between it and the ground.

“Sure, Jacky. You’ll push it back to me.”

“Well, what do we do now?” Jack said. “Should I go in the shed right now?”

“Sit there,” Wolf said, pointing to a spot on the floor of the shed a foot from the door.

Jack looked at him curiously, then stepped inside the shed and sat down. Wolf hunkered back down just outside the shed’s open door, and without even looking at Jack, held out his hand toward the boy. Jack took Wolf’s hand. It was like holding a hairy creature about the size of a rabbit. Wolf squeezed so hard that Jack nearly cried out—but even if he had, he didn’t think that Wolf would have heard him. Wolf was staring upward again, his face dreamy and peaceful and rapt. After a second or two Jack was able to shift his hand into a more comfortable position inside Wolf’s grasp.

“Are we going to stay like this a long time?” he asked.

Wolf took nearly a minute to answer. “Until,” he said, and squeezed Jack’s hand again.

9

They sat like that, on either side of the doorframe, for hours, wordlessly, and finally the light began to fade. Wolf had been almost imperceptibly trembling for the previous twenty minutes, and when the air grew darker the tremor in his hand intensified. It was, Jack thought, the way a thoroughbred horse might tremble in its stall at the beginning of a race, waiting for the sound of a gun and the gate to be thrown open.

“She’s beginning to take me with her,” Wolf said softly. “Soon we’ll be running, Jack. I wish you could, too.”

He turned his head to look at Jack, and the boy saw that while Wolf meant what he had just said, there was a significant part of him that was silently saying: I could run after you as well as beside you, little friend.

“We have to close the door now, I guess,” Jack said. He tried to pull his hand from Wolf’s grasp, but could not free himself until Wolf almost disdainfully released him.

“Lock Jacky in, lock Wolf out.” Wolf’s eyes flared for a moment, becoming red molten Elroy-eyes.

“Remember, you’re keeping the herd safe,” Jack said. He stepped backward into the middle of the shed.

“The herd goes in the barn, and the lock goes on the door. He Would Not Injure His Herd.” Wolf’s eyes ceased to drip fire, shaded toward orange.

“Put the lock on the door.”

“God pound it, that’s what I’m doing now,” Wolf said. “I’m putting the God-pounding lock on the God-pounding door, see?” He banged the door shut, immediately sealing Jack up in the darkness. “Hear that, Jacky? That’s the God-pounding lock.” Jack heard the lock click against the metal loop, then heard its ratchets catch as Wolf slid it home.

“Now the key,” Jack said.

“God-pounding key, right here and now,” Wolf said, and a key rattled into a slot, rattled out. A second later the key bounced off the dusty ground beneath the door high enough to skitter onto the shed’s floorboards.

“Thanks,” Jack breathed. He bent down and brushed his fingers along the boards until he touched the key. For a moment he clamped it so hard into his palm that he almost drove it through his skin—the bruise, shaped like the state of Florida, would endure nearly five days, when in the excitement of being arrested he would fail to notice that it had left him. Then Jack carefully slid the key into his pocket. Outside, Wolf was panting in hot regular agitated-sounding spurts.

“Are you angry with me, Wolf?” he whispered through the door.

A fist thumped the door, hard. “Not! Not angry! Wolf!”

“All right,” Jack said. “No people, Wolf. Remember that. Or they’ll hunt you down and kill you.”

No peopOOOWWW-OOOOOOOOHHHOOOO!” The word turned into a long, liquid howl. Wolf’s body bumped against the door, and his long black-furred feet slid into the opening beneath it. Jack knew that Wolf had flattened himself out against the shed door. “Not angry, Jack,” Wolf whispered, as if his howl had embarrassed him. “Wolf isn’t angry. Wolf is wanting, Jacky. It’s so soon now, so God-pounding soon.”

“I know,” Jack said, now suddenly feeling as if he had to cry—he wished he could have hugged Wolf. More painfully, he wished that they had stayed the extra days at the farmhouse, and that he were now standing outside a root cellar where Wolf was safely jailed.

The odd, disturbing thought came to him again that Wolf was safely jailed.

Wolf’s feet slid back under the door, and Jack thought he had a glimpse of them becoming more concentrated, slimmer, narrower.

Wolf grunted, panted, grunted again. He had moved well back from the door. He uttered a noise very like “Aaah.”

“Wolf?” Jack said.

An earsplitting howl lifted up from above Jack: Wolf had moved to the top of the gully.

“Be careful,” Jack said, knowing that Wolf would not hear him, and fearing that he would not understand him even if he were close enough to hear.

A series of howls followed soon after—the sound of a creature set free, or the despairing sound of one who wakes to find himself still confined, Jack could not tell which. Mournful and feral and oddly beautiful, the cries of poor Wolf flew up into the moonlit air like scarves flung into the night. Jack did not know he was trembling until he wrapped his arms around himself and felt his arms vibrating against his chest, which seemed to vibrate, too.

The howls diminished, retreating. Wolf was running with the moon.

10

For three days and three nights, Wolf was engaged in a nearly ceaseless search for food. He slept from each dawn until just past noon, in a hollow he had discovered beneath the fallen trunk of an oak. Certainly Wolf did not feel himself imprisoned, despite Jack’s forebodings. The woods on the other side of the field were extensive, and full of a wolf’s natural diet. Mice, rabbits, cats, dogs, squirrels—all these he found easily. He could have contained himself in the woods and eaten more than enough to carry him through to his next Change.

But Wolf was riding with the moon, and he could no more confine himself to the woods than he could have halted his transformation in the first place. He roamed, led by the moon, through barnyards and pastures, past isolated suburban houses and down unfinished roads where bulldozers and giant asymmetrical rollers sat like sleeping dinosaurs on the banks. Half of his intelligence was in his sense of smell, and it is not exaggerating to suggest that Wolf’s nose, always acute, had attained a condition of genius. He could not only smell a coop full of chickens five miles away and distinguish their odors from those of the cows and pigs and horses on the same farm—that was elementary—he could smell when the chickens moved. He could smell that one of the sleeping pigs had an injured foot, and one of the cows in the barn an ulcerated udder.

And this world—for was it not this world’s moon which led him?—no longer stank of chemicals and death. An older, more primitive order of being met him on his travels. He inhaled whatever remained of the earth’s original sweetness and power, whatever was left of qualities we might once have shared with the Territories. Even when he approached some human dwelling, even while he snapped the backbone of the family mutt and tore the dog into gristly rags he swallowed whole, Wolf was aware of pure cool streams moving far beneath the ground, of bright snow on a mountain somewhere a long way west. This seemed a perfect place for a transmogrified Wolf, and if he had killed any human being he would have been damned.

He killed no people.

He saw none, and perhaps that is why. During the three days of his Change, Wolf did kill and devour representatives of most other forms of life to be found in eastern Indiana, including one skunk and an entire family of bobcats living in limestone caves on a hillside two valleys away. On his first night in the woods he caught a low-flying bat in his jaws, bit off its head, and swallowed the rest while it was still jerking. Whole squadrons of domestic cats went down his throat, platoons of dogs. With a wild, concentrated glee he one night slaughtered every pig in a pen the size of a city block.

But twice Wolf found that he was mysteriously forbidden from killing his prey, and this too made him feel at home in the world through which he prowled. It was a question of place, not of any abstract moral concern—and on the surface, the places were merely ordinary. One was a clearing in the woods into which he had chased a rabbit, the other the scruffy back yard of a farmhouse where a whimpering dog lay chained to a stake. The instant he set a paw down in these places, his hackles rose and an electric tingling traversed the entire distance of his spine. These were sacred places, and in a sacred place a Wolf could not kill. That was all. Like all hallowed sites, they had been set apart a long time ago, so long ago that the word ancient could have been used to describe them—ancient is probably as close as we can come to representing the vast well of time Wolf sensed about him in the farmer’s back yard and the little clearing, a dense envelope of years packed together in a small, highly charged location. Wolf simply backed off the sacred ground and took himself elsewhere. Like the wing-men Jack had seen, Wolf lived in a mystery and so was comfortable with all such things.

And he did not forget his obligations to Jack Sawyer.

11

In the locked shed, Jack found himself thrown upon the properties of his own mind and character more starkly than at any other time in his life.

The only furniture in the shed was the little wooden bench, the only distraction the nearly decade-old magazines. And these he could not actually read. Since there were no windows, except in very early morning when light came streaming under the door he had trouble just working out the pictures on the pages. The words were streams of gray worms, indecipherable. He could not imagine how he would get through the next three days. Jack went toward the bench, struck it painfully with his knee, and sat down to think.

One of the first things he realized was that shed-time was different from time on the outside. Beyond the shed, seconds marched quickly past, melted into minutes which melted into hours. Whole days ticked along like metronomes, whole weeks. In shed-time, the seconds obstinately refused to move—they stretched into grotesque monster-seconds, Plasticman-seconds. Outside, an hour might go by while four or five seconds swelled and bloated inside the shed.

The second thing Jack realized was that thinking about the slowness of time made it worse. Once you started concentrating on the passing of seconds, they more or less refused to move at all. So he tried to pace off the dimensions of his cell just to take his mind off the eternity of seconds it took to make up three days. Putting one foot in front of another and counting his steps, he worked out that the shed was approximately seven feet by nine feet. At least there would be enough room for him to stretch out at night.

If he walked all the way around the inside of the shed, he’d walk about thirty-two feet.

If he walked around the inside of the shed a hundred and sixty-five times, he’d cover a mile.

He might not be able to eat, but he sure could walk. Jack took off his watch and put it in his pocket, promising himself that he would look at it only when he absolutely had to.

He was about one-fourth of the way through his first mile when he remembered that there was no water in the shed. No food and no water. He supposed that it took longer than three or four days to die of thirst. As long as Wolf came back for him, he’d be all right—well, maybe not all right, but at least alive. And if Wolf didn’t come back? He would have to break the door down.

In that case, he thought, he’d better try it now, while he still had some strength.

Jack went to the door and pushed it with both hands. He pushed it harder, and the hinges squeaked. Experimentally, Jack threw his shoulder at the edge of the door, opposite the hinges. He hurt his shoulder, but he didn’t think he had done anything to the door. He banged his shoulder against the door more forcefully. The hinges squealed but did not move a millimeter. Wolf could have torn the door off with one hand, but Jack did not think that he could move it if he turned his shoulders into hamburger by running into it. He would just have to wait for Wolf.

By the middle of the night, Jack had walked seven or eight miles—he’d lost count of the number of times he had reached one hundred and sixty-five, but it was something like seven or eight. He was parched, and his stomach was rumbling. The shed stank of urine, for Jack had been forced to pee against the far wall, where a crack in the boards meant that at least some of it went outside. His body was tired, but he did not think he could sleep. According to clock-time, Jack had been in the shed barely five hours; in shed-time it was more like twenty-four. He was afraid to lie down.

His mind would not let him go—that was how it felt. He had tried making lists of all the books he’d read in the past year, of every teacher he’d had, of every player on the Los Angeles Dodgers . . . but disturbing, disorderly images kept breaking in. He kept seeing Morgan Sloat tearing a hole in the air. Wolf’s face floated underwater, and his hands drifted down like heavy weeds. Jerry Bledsoe twitched and rocked before the electrical panel, his glasses smeared over his nose. A man’s eyes turned yellow, and his hand became a claw-hoof. Uncle Tommy’s false teeth coruscated in the Sunset Strip gutter. Morgan Sloat came toward his mother, not himself.

“Songs by Fats Waller,” he said, sending himself around another circuit in the dark. “ ’Your Feets Too Big.’ ’Ain’t Misbehavin.’ ’Jitterbug Waltz.’ ’Keepin Out of Mischief Now.’ ”

The Elroy-thing reached out toward his mother, whispering lewdly, and clamped a hand down over her hip.

“Countries in Central America. Nicaragua. Honduras. Guatemala. Costa Rica . . .”

Even when he was so tired he finally had to lie down and curl into a ball on the floor, using his knapsack as a pillow, Elroy and Morgan Sloat rampaged through his mind. Osmond flicked his bullwhip across Lily Cavanaugh’s back, and his eyes danced. Wolf reared up, massive, absolutely inhuman, and caught a rifle bullet directly in the heart.

The first light woke him, and he smelled blood. His whole body begged for water, then for food. Jack groaned. Three more nights of this would be impossible to survive. The low angle of the sunlight allowed him dimly to see the walls and roof of the shed. It all looked larger than he had felt it to be last night. He had to pee again, though he could scarcely believe that his body could afford to give up any moisture. Finally he realized that the shed seemed larger because he was lying on the floor.

Then he smelled blood again, and looked sideways, toward the door. The skinned hindquarters of a rabbit had been thrust through the gap. They lay sprawled on the rough boards, leaking blood, glistening. Smudges of dirt and a long ragged scrape showed that they had been forced into the shed. Wolf was trying to feed him.

“Oh, Jeez,” Jack groaned. The rabbit’s stripped legs were disconcertingly human. Jack’s stomach folded into itself. But instead of vomiting, he laughed, startled by an absurd comparison. Wolf was like the family pet who each morning presents his owners with a dead bird, an eviscerated mouse.

With two fingers Jack delicately picked up the horrible offering and deposited it under the bench. He still felt like laughing, but his eyes were wet. Wolf had survived the first night of his transformation, and so had Jack.

The next morning brought an absolutely anonymous, almost ovoid knuckle of meat around a startingly white bone splintered at both ends.

12

On the morning of the fourth day Jack heard someone sliding down into the gully. A startled bird squawked, then noisily lifted itself off the roof of the shed. Heavy footsteps advanced toward the door. Jack raised himself onto his elbows and blinked into the darkness.

A large body thudded against the door and stayed there. A pair of split and stained penny loafers was visible through the gap.

“Wolf?” Jack asked softly. “That’s you, isn’t it?”

“Give me the key, Jack.”

Jack slipped his hand into his pocket, brought out the key, and pushed it directly between the penny loafers. A large brown hand dropped into view and picked up the key.

“Bring any water?” Jack asked. Despite what he had been able to extract from Wolf’s gruesome presents, he had come close to serious dehydration—his lips were puffy and cracked, and his tongue felt swollen, baked. The key slid into the lock, and Jack heard it click open.

Then the lock came away from the door.

“A little,” Wolf said. “Close your eyes, Jacky. You have night-eyes now.”

Jack clasped his hands over his eyes as the door opened, but the light which boomed and thundered into the shed still managed to trickle through his fingers and stab his eyes. He hissed with the pain. “Better soon,” Wolf said, very close to him. Wolf’s arms circled and lifted him. “Eyes closed,” Wolf warned, and stepped backward out of the shed.

Even as Jack said, “Water,” and felt the rusty lip of an old cup meet his own lips, he knew why Wolf had not lingered in the shed. The air outside seemed unbelievably fresh and sweet—it might have been imported directly from the Territories. He sucked in a double tablespoon of water that tasted like the best meal on earth and wound down through him like a sparkling little river, reviving everything it touched. He felt as though he were being irrigated.

Wolf removed the cup from his lips long before Jack considered he was through with it. “If I give you more you’ll just sick it up,” Wolf said. “Open your eyes, Jack—but only a little bit.”

Jack followed directions. A million particles of light stormed into his eyes. He cried out.

Wolf sat down, cradling Jack in his arms. “Sip,” he said, and put the cup once more to Jack’s lips. “Eyes open, little more.”

Now the sunlight hurt much less. Jack peered out through the screen of his eyelashes at a flaring dazzle while another miraculous trickle of water slipped down his throat.

“Ah,” Jack said. “What makes water so delicious?”

“The western wind,” Wolf promptly replied.

Jack opened his eyes wider. The swarm and dazzle resolved into the weathered brown of the shed and the mixed green and lighter brown of the gully. His head rested against Wolf’s shoulder. The bulge of Wolf’s stomach pressed into his backbone.

“Are you okay, Wolf?” he asked. “Did you get enough to eat?”

“Wolfs always get enough to eat,” Wolf said simply. He patted the boy’s thigh.

“Thanks for bringing me those pieces of meat.”

“I promised. You were the herd. Remember?”

“Oh, yes, I remember,” Jack said. “Can I have some more of that water?” He slid off Wolf’s huge lap and sat on the ground, where he could face him.

Wolf handed him the cup. The John Lennon glasses were back; Wolf’s beard was now little more than a scurf covering his cheeks; his black hair, though still long and greasy, fell well short of his shoulders. Wolf’s face was friendly and peaceful, almost tired-looking. Over the bib overalls he wore a gray sweatshirt, about two sizes too small, with INDIANA UNIVERSITY ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT stencilled on the front.

He looked more like an ordinary human being than at any other time since he and Jack had met. He did not look as if he could have made it through the simplest college course, but he could have been a great high-school football player.

Jack sipped again—Wolf’s hand hovered above the rusty tin cup, ready to snatch it away if Jack gulped. “You’re really okay?”

“Right here and now,” Wolf said. He rubbed his other hand over his belly, so distended that it stretched the fabric at the bottom of the sweatshirt as taut as a hand would a rubber glove. “Just tired. Little sleep, Jack. Right here and now.”

“Where’d you get the sweatshirt?”

“It was hanging on a line,” Wolf said. “Cold here, Jacky.”

“You didn’t hurt any people, did you?”

“No people. Wolf! Drink that water slow, now.” His eyes disconcertingly shaded into happy Halloween orange for a second, and Jack saw that Wolf could never really be said to resemble an ordinary human being. Then Wolf opened his wide mouth and yawned. “Little sleep.” He hitched himself into a more comfortable position on the slope and put down his head. He was almost immediately asleep.